October 7, 2012

Willis Harman (August 16, 1918 – January 30, 1997) was an American engineer, social scientist, academic, futurist, writer, and visionary. He is best remembered for his work with SRI International, for being president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, and for his work in raising consciousness within the international business community.

London: By extension, then, things should begin to change as people start to change and question their own assumptions.

Harman: There are certainly long-term forces
that suggest, at least in the long-term, it's all got to change, and the
role of business has to be different. The role of business has to be
one that shares in the total responsibility of the planet. It may take
many decades for that sort of change to happen. But there are many, many
areas in which there could be a severe crisis of one sort or another
that would cause people to feel jolted and say, "We'd better reassess
things a whole lot faster." This could a very severe environmental
disaster or a severe financial situation. For example, the debt
structure around the world might bring about something like this. And
another likely place is the whole currency and gambling system around
the world.

London: Do you mean the stock market?

Harman: The stock market and its derivatives in
all sorts of other things.
25 or 30 years ago, international exchanges of currency were
almost entirely related to goods and services. In other words, the
global economy was about what we used to call trade. Now the global
economy is over 97 percent speculation in one name or another. Only
about 2.5 percent of the exchanges have anything to do with goods or
services or anything that is directly related to the well-being of human
beings.
The Berings Bank went down because of this kind of speculation.
The Japanese economy was severely hit by an earthquake, and somebody
made a bad guess — and out went the bank in London. That could happen on
a large scale.

London: You mentioned currency speculation.
From what I understand, this is a fairly new development tied to the
fact that the value of money is no longer determined by gold and silver.

Harman: In the early 1970s, all of the major
currencies of the world shifted from being based on gold and silver to
being debt-based — money borrowed into existence from national banks.
What on Earth does this mean, that the total nature of currency shifted?
Nobody voted on it, it just happened. Nobody has thought through what
the consequences of that might be. I think one of the consequences is
that the whole international currency system is very precarious now.
That doesn't mean that I'm predicting it will collapse next year, or ten
years from now or next week. But it is much more possible now than it
might have been before.